four things
by crankyhermit
Summary: Four things that matter.
1. the first thing: knife's edge

knife's edge  
  
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This is a knife. Only an ordinary blade, you see, forged by a man of no exceptional talent, and sold to another ordinary man who kept it on display in his house. A useless thing. But it is sharp, very sharp. Here is the edge.  
  
Sharp enough to cut through skin, don't you think? Then the subcutaneous fat beneath it, and the veins and muscles running along white bones. Perhaps not sharp enough to cut bone, but once the blade has passed through flesh, who needs to break bones then? It is a simple matter to slip it between the ribs, or thrust up into the soft belly filled with slick organs. If you are fast, your hand sure and steady, you could pull it across the throat where the windpipe and pulsing arteries are. That too will be effective.  
  
Sharp enough to sever the individual filaments in fate as well, so quick and precise the other threads will never notice until it is their turn to fall free, and flutter aimlessly while the tapestry itself remains, and the image will be unutterably altered by this. Sharp enough to sever reality, is it not? Look, here is a man. He is human. And then he is not.  
  
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Comments of any sort are very welcome, thank you. 


	2. the second thing: a deck of cards

a deck of cards  
  
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Are you a gambling man? Play a round with me. We both have nothing to do anyway. You don't trust my cards? Look, you can examine them. They're not marked. Of course I won't stack the deck; what kind of shark do you think I am? You shuffle then, if you're afraid.  
  
Oops. Too bad for you. Yes, I win a lot, but that's just the way the cards fall. I do know how to stack the deck, and how to calculate odds by the cards that have entered play, but I don't need to. Lady Luck favours me. What, if she has a change of heart? Oh, it won't last. Luck's a fickle bitch. Let the cards fall where they will. Besides, it's not smart to get too used to having things your way all the time. You can't touch her deck.  
  
Want another go?  
  
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Comments of any sort are very welcome, thank you. 


	3. the third thing: shackles

shackles  
  
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They were conceived where first he woke to darkness, from the steel umbilical wrapped around the crumbling stone that bore him. But he did not see them, having eyes only for the bright moon above him, a dazzling false sun illuminating the night sky.  
  
Re-forged, the cold metal was twisted around his wrists and neck, and again around his ankles, until one might have thought him stillborn. Yet he would not see them still, lost in the new and unchanging world he had been plunged into, trailing behind a second sun.  
  
For an eternity they held him in the earth where he had been born, and then he could not see them, reaching only towards the light and warmth beyond his grasp, until his sun returned, and they seemed to melt away as if they had never been.  
  
but  
  
they remain still, coiled around his every word and action, beneath his every thought and every instinct. Can you not see them?  
  
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Comments of any sort are very welcome, thank you. 


	4. the fourth thing: the scroll

the scroll  
  
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They say that it is not of this world. That may be so. Even the oldest books in the library, of paper yellowed and brittle with age, are bound in sheaves, the pages falling open easily. Mounted on fine silk, it is rolled up and tightly contained.  
  
They recite it by rote, matching sounds to an alien script that bears no correspondences to the faded ink on their ancient texts; those crabbed characters show where the modern ones have their origins.  
  
Make these sounds, thus and thus, and it will respond in such a way. Take it up, command it, and it will reshape the world for you.  
  
It has been a long time since there was anyone who could understand it.  
  
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*Croaks* The next page is nothing but rather inane footnotes that you might be happier not reading. 


End file.
